'Never piss off a poet': Selina Tusitala Marsh on colonialism, Sam Hunt and...
New Zealand’s poet laureate rails against racism – but her poetry is more subversive than strident: ‘You can seduce someone to get your point across’She blows in like a song carried on a powerful...
View ArticleSandettie Light Vessel Automatic by Simon Armitage review – collected poems
The poet laureate’s commissioned work covers subjects as diverse as war and social comedyIt was an unwritten law of postwar Britain that all large parks should contain a commissioned Henry Moore...
View ArticleThe future looks bleak for the restoration of William Blake’s cottage
ITV News has the clearest take on our own bleak futures, while cinemagoers are getting younger all the timeFans of William Blake will be flocking to Tate Britain from early September for an exhibition...
View ArticlePoem of the week: from The Prelude by William Wordsworth
The poet’s youthful disappointment with Cambridge University brings intriguing complication to a perennial complaint ‘Residence at Cambridge’ (Book Three, The Prelude)Not that I slighted Books; that...
View ArticleFrom Little Women to Dickinson: how modernised should adaptations be?
Recent trailers for Greta Gerwig’s take on Louisa May Alcott and Hailee Steinfeld as a punk rock Emily Dickinson suggest a resurgence for 1860s literary womenThe girls of the 1860s appear to be having...
View ArticleMy Name Is Why by Lemn Sissay review – a searing chronicle
The care system’s brutal attack on a black child’s sense of self worth is targeted in the poet’s frank recollections of life in children’s homesEarly on in this affecting memoir, Sissay recalls the...
View ArticleRichard Harris well versed in Irish peace – archive, 30 August 1972
30 August 1972: Actor releases record of poem promoting peace as he thinks politicians have tried and failedMr Richard Harris, the actor, greatly publicised until recently as a hell-raising brawler,...
View ArticleLavinia Greenlaw on Essex: ‘As a teen, even Siberia had to be better'
The poet and novelist recalls the lacerating east wind, the weekly library van and eventually finding inspiration in village lifeWhen I was 11, my family moved from London to an Essex village. I was...
View ArticleThe right poem for the wrong time: WH Auden’s September 1, 1939
Despite the poet’s best attempts to destroy it, readers still turn to his poem about Germany’s invasion of Poland in times of crisis. Why?There are many acclaimed poems that address themselves to the...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Ignotum per Ignotius by Anonymous
Amid the gleeful surrealism, this 18th-century verse relays a palpable anger that resonates with contemporary turmoilContinue reading...
View ArticleO Positive by Joe Dunthorne review – natural joker finds a new home
Novelist Joe Dunthorne makes an assured leap to poetry in this witty and clever collectionJoe Dunthorne is a novelist who understands that joking can be the most powerful way of being serious. In his...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Wildflower Meadow, Medawisla by Stephanie Burt
The miniature lives of flora, well away from human culture, reveal a much grander pictureWildflower Meadow, MedawislaThe many-oared astersare coracles;Continue reading...
View ArticleThe best recent poetry – review roundup
Nobody by Alice Oswald; If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton; In Her Feminine Sign by Dunya Mikhail; and I May Be Stupid But I’m Not That Stupid by Selima HillPoetry is changing. And...
View ArticlePoem of the month: No one uses doilies anymore
so why do I hold the word to the windowso the holes in the pattern are years agoand a visitor has come?Impossible to talk of the mart or catarrhas though days, clumps and clods of them,could be...
View ArticleBook clinic: which collections will get me reading more poetry?
Writer and critic Kate Kellaway on anthologies to help you find your taste, and the best new poetsQ: I read a lot of fiction and nonfiction, but there is a big gap in my poetry reading. What are good...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Song of Songs
Traditionally ascribed to King Solomon, these rich allegorical verses are ripe with sensuous passion1. I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.Continue reading...
View ArticleWhen Milton met Shakespeare: poet's notes on Bard appear to have been found
Hailed as one of the most significant archival discoveries of modern times, text seems to show the Paradise Lost poet making careful annotations on his edition of Shakespeare’s playsAlmost 400 years...
View ArticleCarole Satyamurti obituary
Poet and sociologist who retold the Mahabharata in verseCarole Satyamurti, who has died aged 80, became a poet rather late in her life. She had been a sociology lecturer at the University of East...
View ArticleBill Liddell obituary
My husband, Bill Liddell, who has died aged 82, came from a mining area in Tyne and Wear, but became an expert on the history of somewhere much further south – Essex.Having moved to the county in the...
View ArticleThe 100 best books of the 21st century
Dazzling debut novels, searing polemics, the history of humanity and trailblazing memoirs ... Read our pick of the best books since 2000Read an interview with the author of our No 1 bookRead Ali Smith...
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